As the demand for Wi-Fi services increases, Wi-Fi service providers have continued to deploy new products and services to meet this demand. Some service providers often sell bandwidth service level agreements to wireless end-users in the Wi-Fi access system. In these current Wi-Fi access systems, the wireless station (STA) connects to Wi-Fi Access Points (APs) based on the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 MAC protocol. The wireless station often associates to a Wi-Fi AP having the strongest Receive Signal Strength (RSSI) in a co-located Wi-Fi cell coverage area. However, even though the 802.11 MAC protocol may connect wireless STAs to the AP having the strongest RSSI, the Wi-Fi Access Point may still fail to offer best average user bandwidth to the wireless station, thereby possibly failing to meet the service level agreement.
Failure to meet these SLAs is not acceptable to service providers or users. Therefore, in order to mitigate issues of capacity constraint and capacity degradation that negatively affect the ability of service providers to meet SLAs, Wi-Fi service providers commonly deploy multiple access points in a co-located fashion in a particular area with the aim of improving reliability and capacity for Wi-Fi services to a large number of wireless stations in the area, and to control capacity degradation from interference and noise.
This over-provisioning model is widely employed in an effort to help ensure bandwidth for user service level agreements. Nevertheless, this model cannot guarantee the user bandwidth, and incurs drawbacks in terms of cost, efficiency, and effective use of channel bandwidth. In particular, this and other deployments of co-located AP systems that try to provide additional capacity to their respective areas do not employ any scheme to maintain optimal performance levels at the co-located APs.
For example, some systems with co-located APs employ a general and simplified scheme of equally dividing the wireless station (STAs) among the APs in the co-located system. In other words, an incoming wireless station (STA) is assigned to the AP that has the least number of connected wireless stations in the co-located system of Access Points. However, this scheme of dividing the number of wireless stations equally among the Access Points of a co-located system disadvantageously results in non-optimum performance levels for wireless STAs connecting or that are connected to the system of co-located Access Points. For example, the scheme of dividing the number of wireless stations equally among the Access Points of a co-located system ignores various factors such as connected wireless stations activity, Wi-Fi link rates for connected wireless stations, interference levels at various Access Points, etc., thereby leading to non-optimum performance.